The Rev. Leslie Vogel, a longtime mission co-worker, has answered the call to serve as Presbyterian World Mission’s new regional liaison for Guatemala and Mexico. She begins her new duties June 1.
The Rev. Dr. Niles Reimer is an unassuming presence in any setting and that’s the way he likes it. For Reimer, a return visit in January to Gambella town in Western Ethiopia was the chance to see dear friends and make new memories with generations of young Christians. His many contributions include translating the Anywaa Bible, which made it possible for the Anywaa people to read the scriptures in their own language.
Members of the Fumbisi congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana recently expressed their generosity in big bundles: two large farm sacks filled with fresh peanuts.
They sold the peanuts in the local marketplace and donated the $65 they received to the sending and support of Presbyterian mission co-worker Josh Heikkila.
“I call it the holy place,” said Sultan,* a young man from Eritrea who came to St. Andrew’s Refugee Services (StARS) hoping to access education through the Unaccompanied Youth Bridging Program, a specialized initiative designed to assist young refugees in Egypt without a parent or guardian. Since he was here with his family, he was ineligible to enroll. But he was persistent, eventually landing a job as a teaching assistant in the program. Over the years, he has become a leader among the staff at StARS and now works as a program assistant in the Refugee Legal Aid Program, and as a StARS ambassador, meeting with visitors and planning events.
As a mission co-worker and cultural worker in the Philippines, sometimes I am utterly exhausted. There are periods that require quite a bit of travel related to meetings and theater-based trainings for children, youth, church workers, teachers, women and others. When I am in Dumaguete, days sometimes stretch into late evenings for rehearsals with our youth theater group or with Silliman University Divinity School students preparing for the annual church workers convocation. So a few years ago, when asked by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program if my husband, Cobbie, and I would consider reopening the Philippines YAV service site, we pondered, could we? Should we? Could we say no?
The Rev. Robert I. “Bob” Rasmussen, a mission co-worker in Malawi from January 1986 until his retirement in August 1992, passed away at his home in Michigan on Jan. 25 at age 90. After he retired, Rasmussen and his wife, Edith, returned to Malawi many times, sometimes for months at a time, to train pastors and to preach and teach.
As Presbyterians reflect on the year 2017 and all the blessings it has held, many are remembering with gratitude the life of Marie “Breezy” Lusted.
Lusted, a Presbyterian mission co-worker and long-term volunteer, served as a nurse and Bible translator in Ethiopia for 56 years. She passed away in North Carolina on Oct. 29 at the age of 85.
Mission co- worker Douglas Dicks has gone home. Not to his boyhood home in Virginia but to his spiritual home in Israel/Palestine.
Last month Dicks began serving as an associate for ecumenical partnerships at the invitation of St. Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church in Jerusalem, working with churches in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land. However, neither the job nor the region is new to him. He was commissioned by his home church, Buckton Presbyterian, to go to Jerusalem in September 1995 for two years. He stayed 18 years and finished his term in 2013 to return to Virginia to care for his aging mother.
The hymn “Here I Am, Lord” recently floated through the sanctuary at Las Placitas Presbyterian Church in New Mexico, and just moments later, Dori Kay Hjalmarson walked down the aisle into her ordination and her new role as a mission co-worker in Honduras.
Joanna Shelton was about 5 years old when her grandmother Evie Shelton began to talk to her about Japan. Evie was born in 1889 in Oakland, California, but at the age of 3 months traveled to Japan with her parents, Presbyterian missionaries Tom and Emma Alexander. Evie introduced her granddaughter to chopsticks and a few words of Japanese that she remembered. Shelton later learned details of her great-grandparents’ mission in Japan from a copy of Tom Alexander’s journal. As an agnostic, she considered the journal important to her as a historical and family document, not as an account of a faith journey. Years later that would change.
